There is a pattern anyone who has run a business or a practice for a few years will recognise. You sign up for a piece of software at a fair price. It does the job. Then, each year, the renewal email arrives and the number is a little higher - and the product in front of you looks almost exactly the same as it did last year. New tiers appear above the one you are on. Features you assumed were included quietly become add-ons. The bill goes up; the tool stays still.
We are not going to name and shame particular companies, because we do not need to - if you use business or accounting software, you have almost certainly lived this. What is worth talking about is why it happens, because once you see the mechanism you can shop more wisely.
Why the price goes up when the product does not
Most established software companies answer to investors, not to users. Once a product has enough customers who have built their working lives around it, the incentive shifts from winning customers to extracting more from the ones already locked in. Raising the price of something people cannot easily leave is the single most reliable way to grow revenue - far easier than the slow, expensive work of making the product genuinely better. So the roadmap fills with things that help the vendor sell (new premium tiers, usage limits, add-on modules) rather than things that help you work.
Switching costs are the quiet engine of all this. Your data is in there. Your team knows the screens. Moving would mean re-learning, re-importing and re-training - so you grumble at the renewal and pay it. The vendor knows you will. The price rise is not a reflection of new value; it is a measure of how stuck you are.
What good actually looks like
None of this is inevitable. Software can be priced fairly and stay that way - it just requires the company to make a different promise and mean it. When you are choosing a tool, these are the things worth insisting on:
We built our own products on exactly these principles, because we got tired of the alternative ourselves. Founding prices are locked for as long as a customer stays. Every subscription cancels in one click. And we would rather keep customers by being useful than by being difficult to leave. That is not a marketing line - it is a direct reaction to the pattern above, which we lived through as buyers before we ever built as a company.